She laughed, and because she was laughing she forgot what her hand was doing, which was holding up the entire garland. She let go and stepped down off the stool, and behind her the tinsel came loose from its last thumbtack and the whole silver length of it slithered off the curtain rod and fell, and the balloons fell with it, the 1 and the 9 and the 9 and the 6, onto Sam's head and shoulders, where they bounced and settled with soft foil crinkles, like a year collapsing on a man who had only come with ice.
For a second neither of them moved. Then he said, from somewhere inside the tinsel, "Is this festive?" and she lost it, really lost it, bent over with her hand on the table, and he was laughing too, the low helpless laugh she had heard maybe a dozen times in four years and had kept, privately, like a matchbook from a restaurant she meant to go back to.
She stepped close to pull the tinsel off him. It had gotten into his collar and caught in the cables of the sweater. The 9 had wedged itself against his ear.
"You're terrible at helping," she said.
"And yet you keep inviting me over."
She had a strand of tinsel in her fingers. She was close enough to see the snow melting in his eyebrows. He was not laughing anymore and neither was she, and the radiator ticked, and somewhere down on Clark Street a car horn played the first three notes of something and gave up.
They had been near this before, at the edge of it, enough times that she knew one of them always stepped back. Usually her.
Sam picked up the gold hat from the table and put it on his own head. The elastic snapped under his chin. The cone tilted slightly left.
"Better?" he said.
Delia considered him. Then she reached up, took the hat off him, worked the elastic over her own long hair, which was a project, and settled the cone on her head.
"Worse," she said. "Much worse."
The telephone rang.
It was a white phone with a long coiled cord, mounted on the wall by the kitchen doorway, and it had the old bell inside it, a real bell, loud enough to be heard from the bathtub. The ring went through the apartment like a dropped tray. Delia turned and walked toward it, the gold hat bobbing.
"You never answered," Sam said behind her.
She turned back, one hand already lifted toward the receiver. "Answered what?"
"Why you keep inviting me over."